‘But, my lord, where else—?'
‘If you have no vocation—Saints protect the convent if you had!—I would remind you that a wimple is most unbecoming to you, and golden silk would there be very ill-regarded. So visit Trevaine instead, my lady, and honour me.’
‘If you have run mad, my lord,’ she said gravely, her lips twitching, ‘let us run mad together.’
He laughed triumphantly. ‘Bravely ventured, lass!’ He sobered. ‘Whatever we do, there will be the most succulent scandal gossip ever laid tongue to. Better be a welcome guest at Trevaine, than an outcast begging refuge of the convent’s charity.’
She drew a long, unsteady breath. ‘Lord Hélie, you open Paradise’s gate to me.’
‘After Warby it may well seem so,’ he agreed dryly. ‘You will be safe. Your uncle insisted you must not go back to Collingford. He was no party to his son’s treachery; indeed he was greatly distressed for you.’
‘Or for his lost chance of profitably selling my marriage.’ His eyebrows lifted at her rancour, and she flushed slightly and shrugged. ‘Perhaps I do him less than justice. But Hugh de Morneville spoke for me, and yet he matched me with Warby for a higher price.’
Hélie’s brows contracted; he knew Hugh de Morneville only by repute, but no man’s stood higher. ‘May I know more of this bargaining over your dowry?’
‘The bargain was made four years ago by Robert’s father, five years’ revenue of Vallaroy, paid over on the eve of my marriage. I was just twelve, of age to make an indissoluble betrothal.’
‘You consented freely?’
‘Yes. I had met Robert but once, in company, and you know how charming he could be on first acquaintance.’
‘For a couple of days, if he stayed sober.’
‘He had not then taken to pouring his patrimony down his gullet, nor had he achieved such fame as came with riper years and practice,’ she said grimly. ‘I was wild to be free of my kinsmen.’
‘Why? How did they use you?’
‘Lord Eustace, though honest according to his lights, finds fault from his rising up in the morning to his lying down at night. And Oliver I loathed. And how can a maid refuse the husband chosen for her? But two years later I appreciated my error. My kinsmen were summoned to Normandy, and chose to set me in the care of old Lord Richard, Robert’s father, rather than in the convent, lest I take the veil and cheat them. Shortly afterwards Lord Richard died. There was relief to pay, and money melted in Robert’s hands like butter on a bakestone. When Lord Eustace and Oliver returned he was over-ears in debt to the Jews and could not find my price. That would have to come from my dowry.’
'And once Robert had his talons on it, small hope that they would ever finger a penny,’ Hélie finished, grinning appreciatively.
'Exactly.’
'Now they are free to market you again. And this scandal will keep decent men from offering for you.’
'It may help me to scare off the Fulberts likewise.’
He fell silent, considering her sorry predicament. It was customary and inevitable that guardians should arrange a ward’s marriage to their own profit, but kinsmen seldom did so with such blatant disregard for their victim’s welfare. She was freed at least from Robert de Warby, but the only offers she could expect now would be from spendthrift wastrels or greedy mercenaries so anxious to amend their finances that they would chance a cup of poison.
'If that fails, threaten the knave with a cord of your hair,’ he advised, making a jest of hard fact.
'Better to wind him in the sheet and press a damp pillow over his face,’ she answered seriously, the dimple flickering.
'Do not mention that. Reserve it for need,’ he recommended cheerfully.
They had crossed the open space, and were constrained to ride in single file. Hélie pushed ahead, and Stephen thrust to his stirrup. Gino, who had guarded his master’s back for three lively years and kept it and his own hide whole, automatically fell in as rearguard some twenty yards behind the lady. He had his sling looped round his wrist, and on his lean face a bewildered amusement that proclaimed that this latest vagary of an unaccountable lord baffled him. Hélie grinned at him.
'Lord Hélie, you will see to it that these witches hang?’ Stephen harshly inquired. 'They are not fit to live!’
'So far none has come within my jurisdiction,’ Hélie pointed out. 'They shall have what justice I can procure.’
'They did not lame your horse for malice alone,’ growled the voice at his knee. 'And if the order came to that ale-wife from Warby, who knows how far this devil's fellowship is spread or who is of it? I mislike it. Lord Hélie.'
Hélie thoughtfully ran a thumb along his jaw, rasping the fair stubble that gleamed like gold against his brown skin. Expressed so, he misliked the thought too. Stephen had maybe more than an obsession in his head. But arguing it served no useful purpose; Rohese was beyond his reach in Warby, and her confederates had made very sure that he would not be there tonight.
He turned in the saddle to see Durande de Vallaroy, who grinned at him as she ducked under a low bough. The hard day had had no apparent effect on either her sense of humour or her physical vigour, both of which seemed indestructible, and he wondered how the same sore travails would have affected Hermeline. As he returned his attention to the path, which emphatically demanded it, he realized with a small shock that his first sight of Durande under the apple-tree had put from him any inclination to marry Hermeline.
He was still considering that with wonder when another open space brought the girl to his side, disengaging a venturesome green caterpillar from her red hair. There was a thin smear of blood across one cheek from a scratch, and her dark eyes were narrowed with laughter. She flicked the caterpillar at him.
'I earnestly hope your hunting-lodge boasts a bath-tub,' she commented. 'But of your mercy, my lord, show me no mirror!' Her teeth shone in her heat-flushed face, under the dust-filmed, sweat-darkened hair that tangled wildly about her head. Incredibly, she was enjoying this preposterous adventure, risks, discomforts and all.
Something very odd happened inside Hélie at that moment. He became conscious of his heart's thumping in a curious hollow void, and incredulous comprehension crashed into his brain. He stared witlessly into her eyes for a brief instant, and then jerked his head imperatively at Stephen, who had neither tact nor training to withdraw of his own accord. He fell back sulkily to Gino's side. Hélie swallowed twice before his tongue would obey him, and when he spoke, his voice sounded strange in his own ears—he who had been reckoned apt in comely speech by the ladies of far Provence.
'Lady Durande, have you set your desire on being a widow?'
'From all I have seen of men, it seems the happiest state of woman,’ she declared judicially.
Crazy laughter bubbled in him like water from a spring. 'Then take the chance of becoming mine?' he suggested as gravely. 'Mind you, lass, I shall endeavour to postpone that consummation for the next forty years, but if you will risk bearing with me so long, I will risk the pillow over my face.’
She gasped, and the flush ebbed to leave her face pearl-white, her eyes wide as if in fear. 'My—my lord—you are saying—?'
'I am asking you to marry me, Durande.’
She flinched as if he had struck her. Her hands tightened on the reins, and she gazed between her horse's ears and answered in flat composure. 'You honour me, Lord Hélie, but you must not offer marriage for pity or your noble measure of knightly duty.’
'Duty?’ he repeated explosively, and then laughed. 'Durande, do you really reckon me such a fool?'
She faced him in bewilderment. 'But—but why else—’
'Durande, my lass, can you not see I am over helmet-deep in love with you? And by God's Glory, if we were but alone I should prove it beyond doubting!'
'But how can that be?' she gasped, her incredulous eyes searching his face.
'Set a proper value on yourself! You are laughter and warmth and valour and truth, and fair as a summer dawn
, and you shall marry me. Unless, of course, you cherish a warmer fancy for our friend Fulbert?'
'I have loved you since you greeted me in the garden,' she said simply.
Forgetting the two pairs of astounded eyes at their backs, he leaned from the saddle at that avowal and seized her fiercely. The horses halted shoulder to shoulder. Her mouth came awkwardly and unpractised to his, and their hearts thudded together as sky and trees and rank bracken all vanished in a dazzle of light about them. Then he loosed her, breathless and dazed, and caught at his own bemused wits and suspended breath.
'Heart's darling,' he said soberly, 'you are all I desire, and you shall not go from me.'
She drew a breath that lifted her breasts to strain at the too-tight bodice, and an odd sound between a laugh and a sob broke from her throat. ‘It—this is not possible—in all my vainest dreams I never reckoned you might even look at me, when you could have had Hermeline!’
‘From that dire fate you have preserved me. Stop being humble, lass!'
‘I shall be proud when—when I am sure it is no dream,’ she declared, an awed smile quivering on her lips.
It moved Hélie uncomfortably. Humility was not for her, nor was he the paragon she had deluded herself into imagining. ‘If you reckoned my embrace a dream, my girl, you will provoke me to prove it over again,’ he told her severely.
He won a shaky chuckle. ‘Only if it please you, my lord.'
‘Hélie,’ he told her. ‘I will postpone the proof until a fitter time. And if ever I give you reason again to desire widowhood, Durande, I shall deserve smothering.’
She laughed and flushed together. ‘I have found another ambition.’
‘That is well, for it is not my habit to come to bed drunk,’ he declared virtuously, adding with a shameless grin, ‘It is much more interesting sober.’
Laughing together, they rode stirrup to stirrup up a steep-pitched slope, and from its crest saw the smoke of Ashley rising in thin plumes against the clouds piling in the west. Under the declining sun the hamlet’s wives were preparing supper. By all the signs the wonderful late-summer weather would break in storm tomorrow. The miserable track forced them apart again. Hélie turned once to smile at Durande, and to note the wooden faces of Gino and Stephen that must mask the liveliest curiosity and speculation. He thanked God for His goodness. Not Hermeline with her vixen’s spite, not the sober bargain and the fourteen-years-old innocent, but this magnificent chestnut-haired girl who fired his blood and enchanted his mind and delighted him with laughter. He began to whistle in sheer exuberance, heedless of heat and aching bruises and the discomfort of sweat-sodden garments. He was not dazzled like a silly boy first aware of woman’s beauty, nor crazed by adulterous madness, but surely at home with love.
The forest opened about them. The ancient menace of lowering trees, the uneasy sensation of malevolent eyes watching, vanished with the crowding undergrowth, the piercing seedlings and dead wood that were cleared by rooting swine and firewood-gathering peasants. The trees stood in their drifts of bracken, tamed and peaceable, and the sunlight stabbed slantwise under their leaves. Durande pushed her weary palfrey to Hélie's side, and the dispirited brute he bestrode, sensing journey's end, lifted his drooping head and shuffled a little faster. Then they saw between the trees the hamlet under the further hill.
Hélie uneasily wondered what accommodation the hunting-lodge offered a lady. He had never visited it. Hervey de Trevaine, privileged to take a dozen beasts a year from the royal forest, had occupied it occasionally during the season with small parties of convivial cronies, unconstrained by the presence of his lady and children. There must be some sort of bailiff in charge, with a servant or two, but it was over a year since the place had been used and they were arriving without warning. For himself and the two men anything would serve, but he was fiercely determined to cherish and protect Durande against all hardship.
The village was only a dozen or so cottages amidst ploughland and meadow, but as it was some sort of centre for the scattered forest hamlets and lonely officials it boasted a tiny church with a squat tower, set in a green churchyard a little apart from the houses. The cottage closely flanking it must be the priest's. The hunting-lodge was beyond the hamlet and half-way up the hill, a huddle of thatch behind a weathered palisade. He set his weary horse to the gentle descent.
A high stack of bracken on two plodding feet, and a faggot of brushwood atop of a homespun skirt, were moving slowly before them along the track. As the riders overtook them they moved aside to give them passage, a bearded serf stooped under his beasts' winter bedding and a sturdy girl with calloused brown feet, erect under her burden. They bobbed respectfully, the alertly inquisitive eyes in their stolid faces searching them. A faintly knowing look enlivened their peasant woodenness; the girl muttered something aside to the man, and a smile that just fell short of a leer stirred his whiskers.
Hélie scowled, feeling the blood rise hotly to his cheeks, sensing the lewd grins behind his back. Then enlightenment visited him like a thunderclap; he realized the other use to which his father had put his hunting-lodge. Now he approached it with a dishevelled wench and no female attendant, and the serfs sniggered over his filial fidelity to his sire's example. Fury scorched him. It was intolerable that Durande's virtue should be defamed by peasants' ineradicable misconceptions.
'Pay no heed, my lord,' she advised with a wry smile. 'We should have expected no less.'
'Lord of Heaven, are we to be dishonoured all our lives, and our children after us, by a filthy slander that we lay together before marriage?'
She attempted no answer to the unanswerable, but soberly regarded the hamlet. Already their arrival was drawing serfs from cottage and byre and garden to gather in the wide street, and a pack of boys and dogs was skirmishing towards them. Hélie swore under his breath, and cast wildly about him for some way of sparing her the ordeal of riding through that throng. He was vividly aware of the hard calm that armoured her feelings. Then his gaze fell upon the church, and he knew at once what he must do.
'Durande, do you trust me?' he demanded abruptly.
'Entirely, my lord.'
'Then will you wed me here and now?' Her eyes widened and her lips parted in astonishment, and he rushed into anxious persuasion. 'I know it is unbecoming to our rank, and you would wish to be married with seemly ceremony and state, not in graceless haste by a village priest, but—oh, dear girl, grant me the right to defend you!'
'With all my heart!' she answered fervently, her face alight.
His heart thumped. 'You understand—you see it is best? It shall be as you wish it, Durande! But to preserve you from slander—'
'Who is being humble now?' she asked unsteadily, the blood flooding red under her fair skin and ebbing as fast. 'We enter joy the sooner.'
And as the first yelping forerunners of the pack reached them, they turned between the barley-stubble and the new-ploughed fallow towards the green graveyard and the squat grey church.
10
THE priest, a stocky peasant in his thirties, was already at his garden-fence, an iron-shod spade in his hand and his earth-stained cassock kilted up about dirty legs. A barefoot brat attired only in a smock stared at them finger in mouth from the cottage doorway, and Hélie glimpsed within a vague flutter that could only be a woman's kerchief ducking from sight. His mouth tightened, but he pretended to have noticed nothing. Vows of celibacy were not uncommonly broken in country parishes, and this was no time for discussing it. He dismounted and courteously made known his requirements.
While not actively obstructive, the priest was not readily helpful. He was successively incredulous, doubtful and reluctant, fearing for himself the consequences of this unprecedented act, and Hélie had to intimate with brisk firmness that since both parties were of age to wed and not previously contracted elsewhere, he had no choice but to perform his office. Glumly he led the odd marriage procession, now augmented by every soul in the village who could stand and go, to the church p
orch, and there nervously called on all present to witness this wedding.
The whispering, nudging throng hushed in sheer astonishment at the honour done their church, gaping at their unknown young lord and the ill-famed girl he had unaccountably chosen. Hélie flashed his hard glance over them as he took his stand beside Durande; then he forgot all but her, grave and still beside him. The brief, mechanical ceremony, the peasant priest he neither knew nor respected stumbling over his mangled Latin, were vague and dreamlike. He heard his own voice and Durande's repeating unfamiliar words, but reality did not touch him until their hands joined, warm and sticky with sweat and grime. Some formula was pronounced; his bemused brain tugged at the Latin for a moment before it translated itself. They were man and wife.
He smiled down into her steady dark eyes with pride and tenderness.
The villagers broke from their trance of astonishment to raise a ragged cheer. They swarmed after the four as they quitted the churchyard and got to horse again, and escorted them, wildly appreciative of the runaway marriage, capering and howling and offering bawdy congratulations the length of the street, and then stormed as one for the ale-house to drink it dry at Hélie's charges. The little company plodded up the slope, letting the tired horses set their own pace. Hélie and Durande unashamedly held hands. Gino was grinning frank approval, but Stephen was plainly contemplating the far-reaching consequences of his half-brother's crazy impulse with glum consternation.
Hélie loosed Durande's hand for a moment, tugged the purple amethyst from his own finger and set it on hers. She lifted it and gazed with incredulous pleasure, as though she had never had a ring on her hand before.
'My lord! This for me?' she said like a child.
'I wore it in trust for you. My dearest friend's mother bade me bestow it on my wife.' No shadow of doubt lifted from her candid face; she had never imagined him so insensitive as to give her another woman's love-token.
Power of Darkness Page 17